Thursday, 20 August 2009

Today's word is shovel-ready. During a recent visit to Canberra, I encountered the word several times, used in a normal everyday context. The main reason for this is that because of our infrastructure-driven economic recovery, which has been so effective, it became increasingly important for government to locate projects which are shovel-ready.

The meaning is fairly clear - a project for which early stages are completed (rationale development, planning, and so on) so that we can start spending money now. The importance of the concept, and hence the ubiquity of the term in these difficult times, are also clear. The term is also used extensively in the US, where similar strategies are being used to pull that nation out of recession. The concept of shovel-ready infrastructure projects was referred to in Word-Spy at the end of 2008 but there is a use cited from as early as 1995. The concept is not new.

Some people may have assumed, as I did initially, that shovel-ready refers to shovelling money out of the money wheelbarrow. Not true. The term is a metaphor taken from the building industry.

What this blog is for

This is a blog which started as a vehicle for the 2007 election for vice president of ALIA (the Australian Library and Information Association) - to communicate with members and canvas issues. It continued during my year as president, too, up to May 2009.

I am still using the blog to communicate with ALIA members and lots of other people too, on a variety of issues - libraries, copyright, censorship, and just words.

Links

About Me

Derek has been Director, Information Resources and University Copyright Officer at Swinburne University of Technology since 2000. He is responsible for the university library, the university web site, records management and copyright.
He was previously with the State Library of Victoria, becoming Deputy State Librarian in 1996.
Derek has been active in both ALIA and ACLIS, leading the ALIA multicultural campaign in the 1980s, the ALIA Acquisitions Section in the 1990s, ACLIS (as President) in 1998-99 and ALIA (President and Vice-President) in 2007-2009. His medal of the Order of Australia (2002) is for services to libraries and the Internet.